


Sára Roimë (Bitter Hunt)

by lferion



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angband, Bingo, Challenge Response, Community: fan_flashworks, Fealty, First Age, Gen, Hunters & Hunting, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 15:34:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20473367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: Tyelcormo takes his fealty seriously. Hunting is what he does, and even not finding is information.





	Sára Roimë (Bitter Hunt)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](https://fan-flashworks.dreamwidth.org/1942240.html) on Fan Flashworks for the challenge 'Pen or Pin' and the bingo prompt 'Hunt'.
> 
> Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Athena for encouragement & sanity-checking, and the amazing writers in the Silmarillion fandom for continuing inspiration.
> 
> Content notes: Nothing graphic, but it's Thangorodrim and Angband, so….   
In the same continuity as Nîdh and Glîtainbar, though it stands alone.  
Set before contact with Doriath, so nobody has changed their name yet.   
Names: — Tyelcormo = Celegorm | Makalaurë = Maglor | Maitimo = Maedhros | Curufinwë = Curufin

* * *

People, thought Tyelcormo savagely, do not belong in pens. Most animals do not, except briefly and by exigency. There was no situation so dire that could justify or excuse or even explain this horror. People and once-people and animals that were people and animals that were not people crowded into a grid-work of ugly, close-wrought bars, gaps too narrow to fit more than hand or hoof and mostly not even that. It was horrific and sickening and there was nothing he could do to get them out. 

His eyes moved over the clustered, too-still (though obviously not dead — he could feel their fëar, — and he wondered if it would be better if they were, if they wished for that release, hopeless of freedom living, and what it would take to free them all either way: not enough arrows in his quiver for the one, he’d need Curufinwë for the other just to start …) forms, hunting for height, a particular shock of red among all the pale and dark-wreathed heads. The pens had no roofs, and the cold wind blew sour from the ice-rimed fens that were but one of the hazards of daring this close to the walls of Morgoth's domain.

The crevice he was tucked into was high up one of the walls of the great cavern scooped out of the eastern peak of Thangorodrim, a perfect hunter’s blind. He could see the whole of it in the sulfurous, sullen light of Gorthaur’s lamps, where no one on would see him or even the flaw in the rock the small rock-denizens had taken advantage of to make this space he lay in unless they could fly. (Which, some of the foe could, so he needed to stay alert.) 

He did not know whether to be glad or grieved at failing to find his quarry. That would be too easy, though easy was not a word that applied to anything about Morgoth’s realm. And he dared not go further down, farther in. He was already over the line of what he’d promised Maitimo and Makalaurë, and while those promises didn't bite the way Atar’s Oath did, they were binding enough — _to come and to go, to do and let be_ — to be uncomfortable bending so far. However much his heart and spirit raged to keep looking. Hunting was what he _did_ after all. 

But after a star-counted tree-year span in this benighted land and well they knew there was no finding what Morgoth actively worked to conceal. And no missing what he wanted to be known. Why else but torment would the Enemy allow Maitimo’s brothers to feel that he yet lived? Too many siblings, spouses, parents, children were fëa-severed, even when other evidence said they were not perished yet. And there was no leaving the depths of the iron hell without its lord having it so.

Maitimo lived. Still recognizably himself. Pent in torment in a trap Tyelkormo could not open, a snare he could not untangle, welded chains he could not break. 

It made him mad as fire there was nothing he could _do_. 

Only, maybe there was. There were creatures beneath the notice of the lord and chief minions of this place. Mice, rock-slithers, lesser were-worms. The creatures that had made this space and were glad he was here in it. What one rock-slither knew, the whole colony did. And they spoke with the mice and worms. Perhaps he could at least manage information not mediated by the Enemy. Or no more mediated than the foul air, spoiled stone, and putrid water made unavoidable. Doing without doing, speaking without speaking, A hunt bitter in the doing and the telling. Makalaurë would not be happy with him (though less unhappy than if he were not to return at all), but little would make him happy in any case. He bent his mind to the task.

* * *

When, the better part of two star-counted tree-years later, his small informants gave him to understand the situation had changed, he knew it was not good news. 'Made part of the rock?' 'Fire-self stone-pinned?' 'Cliff-bait?' What could that possibly mean?

Then the Moon rose for the first time, the Sun shortly thereafter, and Tyelcormo, Makalaurë, and the rest of them understood all too well.

* * *


End file.
